The Ancestral Home (12/20/10)

I. am. not. playin'--take it in the face, Jet Lag--I'm up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed; today we visit the rural township of Jia4xi3, where my mom was raised (by wolves). I guess technically, it's not either my nor my mother's ancestral home, since we "belong" to her husband's/my father's side of the family now.

Culturally-speaking.

Patriarchally-speaking.

I don't know what dispensations are made if you're separated/estranged from said husband/father.

Maybe we belong nowhere. It's still a place where a woman's happiness and social status is largely dependent on how many children she has (and by "children," we mean "sons"), and the extended family unit, so where does my mom belong? No husband, a daughter who lives--by choice and necessity--nearly three thousand miles from her, and lost in America.

And me? I'm estranged from my pops, part pigheadedness and long-standing resentment for abandoning me to a mother who over the years became increasingly unhinged. I remember him shouting at my mom in our tiny, one-bedroom apartment that he had no 后代, hou4 dai4, no descendants. Thanks, dad. Twenty-nine, and I haven't seen him since I was sixteen, and this is what I remember of him.

Fun times. What did we have for breakfast?

Typical Taiwanese fare:

Tien2 dou4 jiang1, sweet soy milk, warm;


mien4 xien4 in Mandarin and mi3 sua3, basically "noodle threads," a gloppy noodle soup that tastes a lot better than it looks, brought home from the market in a tin;





two types of da4bing3, translation, "big cookie," ([grin]), slightly sweet, eggy (as I recall), spongy, and chewy;


starfruit--note the shape. It's usually actually star-shaped, but these are chopped up;


and the leftover offal with pickled et cetera from last night.

Then we're off to Jia4xi3, my yi2zhang4--"the non-blood uncle married to my aunt" driving us past Daoist and/or Buddhist temples. I don't know the difference, but the internets tells us that Daoist temples tend to be colorful, so I'm presuming that these ones are Daoist, although the internets also tells us that Daoism has a more or less syncretic relationship to Buddhism.

(P.S. The "d" of Dao is uttered with a softer d sound, with the tongue flattening a little more across the roof of the mouth than the "d" of den, dick, and dog, the combination of which has the makings of a very NSFW Youtube vid. No, I wouldn't. Yes, I would. No, really, I wouldn't. But maybe.)




Stunning, ain't they? Like, not stunning in terms of a Rothko or Taylor Kitsch, but there's something so exuberant, so insistent about the color and sheer quantity of carvings.


Who is that lady praying to? It ain't Jesus H. Christ, that's for gotdamn sure.

And then, at last. My mom used to transport us on a motor scooter from my paternal grandparents' place, where dutiful daughters-in-law go to be tortured, in 花坛, or Hua4tan3, meaning "flower bed" (ain't that pretty?) to visit my maternal grandparents. I have memories--or maybe just memories of photographs, more like--of when I was a toddler, strapped to her back or standing between her legs.

We drive into the courtyard to be greeted by relatives--I don't catch the exact nature of the kinship. The center of the compound, as you walk in, houses the family shrine, and into I go, maybe trampling on all sorts of religious etiquette, with my camera, but no one seems to be horrified, so...I think I'm in the clear.




Trying to imagine the decades of 拜拜, bai4bai4, or worship/prayer/"bowing with palms together" this room has seen.


Apparently, the back of this document has the names of all the fam dating back for generations. You get your name written in it after you die, and I believe there's a space on it for women, too, though I imagine only women "belonging" to the family, that is, not women who marry out. Alas, the document is only opened on auspicious days as determined by a fortuneteller, and today, it ain't that.

It seems the left wing of the compound is abandoned now, but in the room where my grandparents used to sleep on a raised, hard platform--you know, straight out of like, The Good Earth, is their photograph, and--


for fuck's sake:


photos of me that my mom had given 'em, of me as a toddler and then a grade schooler--top two and bottom on the left, top and bottom on the right. It's eerie and heartbreaking and soul-warming all at the same time. I grew up so isolated from any sense of family aside from my vicariously diagnosed, borderline personality disordered mother, and so what understanding of the concept of family I've constructed for myself is beyond fucked. Never before the sense that people came before you, and that people care about each other just because they share DNA. (Is okay; I'm in therapy.)

This is the outside of the house:


That main door to the right of the car is the door to the family shrine--which is consistent with the belief that the main door is reserved for the gods to enter, since ancestors are essentially family gods.

It looks kinda decent, don't it?

In actuality:


Look, a toil-er, or is it show-let? I'm pretty sure people bathed right next to the toilet. What the feezy? Thass old school ghetto.